3 Review(s)

When he discovers that his father worked on missiles for a defense contractor, Jeff Porter is inspired to revisit America's atomic past and our fallen heroes, in particular J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The result, ""Oppenheimer Is Watching Me"", takes readers back to the cold war, when men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter and fears of national security troubled our sleep. With an eye for strange symmetries, Porter traces how one panicky moment shaped the lives of a generation. All the figures in this masterful work are caught in a web of coincidences and paranoias, the chapters strewn with the icons of American material culture of a bygone era - vintage Pontiacs, Fizzie sodas, Geiger counters, latex girdles, and, of course, Fat Man and Little Boy. Readers also encounter noteworthy figures from the era, including Francis Gary Powers, whose U2 spy plane was shot out from under him in the skies over the Soviet Union, and Fidel Castro, whom the CIA plotted to kill or, at least, strip of his beard. Seamlessly weaving historical events played out on a grand stage with day-to-day activities of childhood, ""Oppenheimer Is Watching Me"" is a heady mix of personal memoir and cold war history.